Authors: Sara Craven
Polzion, and she sometimes could not contain a little surge of envy
when she heard Elaine talk so carelessly of skiing at Klosters, and
beach parties in the Bahamas. Nor did it help to feel, as she often
did, that Elaine intended her to feel envious.
Robert, on the other hand, was very different. For one thing his
hair was inexorably sandy, instead of being deep auburn like
Elaine's, but his temperament was far more unassuming than his
sister's, and he took the day-to-day running of the stables far more
seriously than she did, although ironically, Elaine was a
spectacularly better rider. But then, Morgana thought, she did not
have his patience with beginners.
For herself, she enjoyed Robert's company. She liked him, and
suspected that given time her feelings could become much
warmer. Ever since the funeral, he had been assiduous in his
attentions, sending her flowers, and phoning nearly every day. She
was grateful for this, and a little relieved too, if she was honest.
The Donlevens had always been charming to her, but she had been
aware all the time in little ways that
they felt Robert could do
better for himself than the daughter of a country hotelier. Now that
it was public knowledge in the area that, since her father's death,
the long-forgotten entail had come into force and that soon she and
her mother would probably be not only penniless but probably
homeless
as well, she had wondered whether any kind of pressure
would be exerted to persuade Robert to let their relationship slide.
If so, it clearly hadn't worked, or had had the opposite effect, she
thought, smiling a little as the image of Robert's pleasant regular
features and clear blue eyes rose in her mind. And of course he
was the fair man Elsa had seen in the cards and he was going to
propose to her and take her away from all this.
She was grinning to herself as she carried the tray into the drawing
room, but the grin faded a little as she encountered the gaze of
Miss Meakins, sitting bolt upright on the edge of her usual chair,
clutching her knitting bag as a drowning person might clutch a
lifebelt. Miss Meakins was elderly, and harmless, and Morgana
felt sympathy for anyone whose life was a succession of cheap
hotels, but she found Miss Meakins passion for attempting to be
unobtrusive a trial. 'Without wishing to be a nuisance . . and 'I
wonder if I might . . .' preceded even the most normal of requests
and she seemed to spend most mealtimes in a state of permanent
agitation.
A hotelier's lot is not a happy one, Morgana thought grimly as she
set down the tea tray.
'Have you any idea where the others are, Miss Meakins?'
'Major Lawson usually goes for a walk before tea,' Miss Meakins
said primly:
Major Lawson, Morgana thought, wasn't daft. She and her mother
sometimes wondered about him: They usually had two or three
permanent guests each winter at Polzion House, but Major Lawson
wasn't in the usual mould at all. When his booking had originally
been received, her father had been inclined to pooh-pooh his rank,
saying he had probably been a clerk in the stores who had decided
to promote himself after discharge. 'Or a con man,' he added
cynically. But Martin Pentreath had been wrong.
Major Lawson was a tall, quietly spoken man, but there was an
indefinable air of command about him. His clothes were not new,
but their cut was impeccable, and the suitcases he'd brought them
in were leather, and had been expensive. But in many ways he was
an enigma. When pressed, he would talk about Army life, but he
spoke in generalities with a certain diffidence. And he was a loner.
Miss Meakins' flutterings had not the slightest effect on him. He
enjoyed walking, and he spent a good deal of time in his room,
working on a small portable typewriter. He was very tidy about his
work, whatever it was. They'd only found out about it by chance,
through Miss Meakins—'Not wishing to be any trouble, dear Mrs
Pentreath, but the constant tapping .. . comes so plainly through the
wall.'
Her eyes had gleamed with curiosity as she spoke, but it was
doomed to be unsatisfied. Major Lawson had never volunteered
why he spent several hours each day typing, and none of the
Pentreaths were prepared to ask him. In the end Major Lawson
was moved to another room, well out of earshot—to Miss
Meakins' secret chagrin, Morgana suspected.
Quite suddenly she knew she had to get out of the house for a
while. It was ridiculous, because it was almost dark, and almost
certainly raining, but she needed to breathe fresh air and be
completely alone for a while. Since her father's death, she had been
rarely alone. Her mother had needed her and there were always
things to be done, and at first she had welcomed this because it
meant there was less time to think, and to worry and ask herself
what she was going to do. But now, when there was so little time
left for thinking and planning, she had to get away on her own for
a while. It had been building up inside her all day, this need to be
alone, to escape. That was why she had felt so restless earlier.
She flashed a brief smile at her mother as she passed her in the
doorway. 'I'm going out for a little while.'
'Just as you please, dear,' Mrs Pentreath responded.
Morgana went into the hall and on into the small cloakroom which
opened off it. Her old school cape was there, and she swung it
round her shoulders, pulling the hood up over her cloud of dark
hair. As she re-emerged into the hall, the telephone rang, and she
crossed to the reception desk to answer it.
'Polzion House,' she said crisply.
It was a relief to hear Robert's quiet 'Hello, darling. Just ringing to
find out how everything went today. What's he like?'
'Your guess is as good as mine. He didn't show up.'
'Well, that's pretty cavalier,' Robert was plainly taken aback.
'Hasn't there even been a message?'
'Nothing at all. We've spent the whole day on tenterhooks, and all
to no avail.'
'I suppose he could have had an accident,' Robert said slowly.
'We thought of that.' Morgana laughed. 'And at this moment he's
breathing his last at the foot of Polzion cliffs. I wish he was,' she
added hotly.
It was Robert's turn to laugh. 'Darling, what a little savage you are!
It's a good job my respected mama can't hear your fulminations.'
'Meaning her worst fears would be fully justified?' Morgana asked
coolly, then relented. 'I'm sorry, Rob. Your mother can't help the
way she is, any more than I can. And I won't say anything
shocking in front of her, I promise. I'm just a little uptight over this
whole business, that's all. And the atmosphere in the house is
deadly at the moment—Elsa prophesying doom all over the place,
and Mummy's trying to be optimistic and see a silver lining in
everything. I was just going for a walk when you rang.'
'In the direction of the Home Farm?' he enquired hopefully.
She sighed. 'Not really. I do need to be on my own. for a time. You
understand, don't you?'
'I'll try to anyway,' he said cheerfully. 'You know I'm here if you
need me. Perhaps I could pick you up later when you've walked
your blues off, and we could have a drink somewhere.'
'Now that would be nice,' she said. 'See you.' She was smiling as
she put the receiver down. Robert was sweet, she thought, and
she'd forgotten to tell him he was the fair man that Elsa had seen in
the cards, but it didn't matter. Gems like that would keep, and she
would enjoy telling him later, over their drink.
As she went out of the house, closing the side door carefully
against the gusting wind, Morgana wondered why she hadn't
considered going down to the Home Farm, because until Rob had
mentioned it, it hadn't even crossed her mind to do so.
Was she being totally fair to him? she wondered. He wanted to
help. The phone calls proved that. He was kind and concerned, and
he'd been furious when he heard about the entail, calling it a 'load
of outdated nonsense and prejudice'. And although she agreed with
every word, it wasn't what she wanted to hear right now.
Nor did she really want to hear him ask her to marry him, which
she suspected he might do. If and when he proposed, she wanted it
to be for the right reasons, and that was quite apart from the fact
that deep in her bones she felt they didn't know each other well
enough yet.
Of course, it might be that they would never know each other well
enough. She and her mother might have to leave Polzion and go
miles away, and eventually, inevitably, the gap that she and Rob
had left in each other's lives would be filled with other people.
Journeys led often to lovers' partings as well as their meetings, she
thought with a little grimace. And 'lover' was a strong way of
describing Rob, although she enjoyed the moments she spent in his
arms. He was a normal man with all the needs which that implied,
but he was not overly demanding. He preferred to let their
relationship proceed steadily rather than sweep her off her feet into
a headlong surrender they might both regret later.
But if she went to him now, with all her doubts and her troubles,
he might interpret her need for comfort and reassurance rather
differently, and that would simply create more problems.
'And just now I have as many as I can handle,' she muttered
against the moan of the wind.
She buried her hands in the pockets of her cape, her fingers closing
round the familiar shape of her small pocket torch, and it was that
which decided her where to go for her walk. Her original intention
had been to follow the lane round, perhaps even as far as the
village, but now she knew she wanted the open spaces of the
stretch of moorland behind the house. Even in summertime, it
seemed bleak, the few trees bent and stunted under the power of
the prevailing westerly gales, but Morgana loved it, in particular
the great stone which crowned its crest.
It was an odd-looking stone—a tall thick stem of granite with
another slab balanced across its top. In some guide books it was
referred to as the Giant's Table, but locally it was known as the.
Wishing Stone because it was said that if you put your hand on the
upright and made a wish, and then circled the stone three times,
the top slab would rock gently if the wish was to be granted. At all
other times, of course, it was said to be immovable, but Morgana
had always thought that a really desperate wisher could probably
give fate a helping hand with a quick nudge at the cross-stone.
Sometimes she'd wondered if there had once been other stones
there, so that the hillside above Polzion had resembled Stonehenge
or Avebury, until people had come and taken them for building.
Yet it was intriguing that they had left this one, and she had asked
herself why often. Maybe it was because they sensed its power, or
more prosaically perhaps it was because the cross-stone had
proved more difficult to shift than anticipated.
Anyway, there it stood, like a mysterious signpost to a secret in the
youth of mankind, surviving the initials which had been carved on
it, the picnics which had been eaten in its shadow, and all the
attempts of vandals to dislodge it, squat and oddly reassuring in its
timelessness.
As she picked her way across the thick clumps of grass and
bracken, the wind snatched at her hood, pulling it back from her
head, and making her dark hair billow round her like a cloud. She
breathed, deeply. This was what she had wanted—the freshness of
damp undergrowth and sea salt brought to her on the moving air.
Rob would think she was mad if he could see her now, she
thought, stumbling a little on a tussock of grass, but then he hadn't
been born here as she had. In fact she'd often wondered what had
prompted his father to buy the Home Farm in the first place.
Perhaps under his rather staid appearance he was really a romantic
at heart, remembering the pull of the boyhood holidays he
mentioned so often. Certainly Morgana doubted whether his wife's
wishes had much to do with his decision. Mrs Donleven's roots
seemed firmly grounded in the Home Counties.